Photography Friday: Hu Li

In Backward-Backward, Hu Li (born in 1955) displays with monumentality characters that are wearing splendid costumes of traditional Chinese theatre and standing in atypical surroundings. These marvelous diptychs–composed of inhospitable landscapes – on the one hand celebrate one of the archetypes of ‘traditional China’; while on the other complain about the progressive erasure of this very heritage.You can view more of Hu Li’s work at Photography of China and view his book here.Photography Friday is a regular feature from Shanghaiist in association with Photography of China, Marine Cabos’s fantastic trilingual blog about photography and photographers in China.